Historically, wet dyed cloth in long strands was draped over a driver roller and passed from the dye kettle to a waiting box. The elongated cloth was allowed to pile into the bottom of the box and seek its own natural resting point; thus, when the cloth was later withdrawn from the box, it was often found to be looped or tangled about itself and thus required some time and effort to remove, deloop and untangle before it could be further processed. To solve this problem Russell Corporation developed a festooner arrangement which received the cloth between a pair of vertically aligned rollers, the bottom being a driven roller and the top an idler roller and fed the cloth to an oscillating funnel to distribute the cloth evenly in the box. The rollers were able to handle cloth rapidly; however, the festooner assembly fed cloth to the funnel faster than the cloth could drop under the influence of gravity; therefore, although the problem of piling into the bottom of the carriage was substantially eliminated, additional problems were encountered. As the cloth passed through the rollers it was rapidly expelled against a baffle such that it would be deflected into the waiting funnel, for transfer into the box. Since the cloth could be expelled faster than it could fall, it would tend to bunch at the baffle and downstream of the rollers. In normal circumstances and during bunching conditions, the cloth has a tendency to cling to the driven roller, resulting in occasional wrapping of the cloth about the rotor. It has been estimated that such an event, which requires stoppage of the equipment for the time needed to clear the roller and possibly cut out any cloth damaged by the wrap, happened two or three times an hour. Further, the faster the rollers went, the more likely a wrap would occur. Therefore, the speed of the transport apparatus was limited by the speed at which the material would fall. Since removal of the cloth from the dye machines is a necessary function, it became clear that the existing situation created a bottleneck, resulting in idle time for the dyeing machinery while unloading transpires or the downstream processing machinery may be waiting on cloth to be delivered. In either event the prior festooner assembly needed improvement to optimize the process throughput. Further, it should be understood that the existing systems used a metal funnel below the driven roller to oscillate as the cloth passed therethrough to attempt to lay the cloth in a regular pattern and reduce coiling and tangling. As the festooner was moved from dye machine to dye machine, the lower end of the funnel would be susceptible to damage from collisions with other machinery. The metallic funnel would be deformed and could become unusable if the deformation were extensive or likely to damage the cloth as it passes through the funnel. Also forces on the rigid funnels are transmitted readily to the festooning mechanism causing serious machine damage.
From the forgoing it may be seen that the existing festooner assemblies known to the inventor required improvement to reduce the downtime, to increase the productivity, and to provide less wasted product and equipment damage.